


My Body's Not a Temple (It's a Custom Fiat 500)

by Seiberwing



Category: Lupin III
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Gunplay, Early in Canon, Gen, Injections, Jigen's Tragic Past, M/M, Mention of Drug Abuse, Mention of Suicidal Ideation, Needles, Partners in Crime, Scars, Theft, Trans Character, brief crossdressing, gender euphoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22864597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiberwing/pseuds/Seiberwing
Summary: For Jigen, much of his life had felt like a long, boring train ride that made him keep looking at his watch and wondering how much longer he'd have to put up with it. He didn't have the kind of active urges that made a man eat his own bullets, but the kind that made you a little less interested in avoiding certain death than you otherwise might be. Lupin made him look forward to the next thing in a way no one else had in years, a realization he'd had while dodging yakuza machine gun blasts and the thought 'I can't die today, I have to go steal diamonds with Lupin next Wednesday' dropped into his head.Lupin was a good thing in his life and that made him paranoid, because nothing good came without strings.---Jigen patiently waits for the other shoe to drop in his fledgling partnership with Lupin III. When it falls, it's not the shoe he expected.
Relationships: Jigen Daisuke/Arsène Lupin III
Comments: 10
Kudos: 127





	My Body's Not a Temple (It's a Custom Fiat 500)

**Author's Note:**

> The Lupin canon timeline is a giant plate of squiggly self-contradicting pasta , but this is set early in their relationship, shortly after "Episode 0: The First Contact" and/or the Woman Named Fujiko Mine series.

The first year that Jigen worked with the man who called himself Arsene Lupin III, Jigen spent waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

At first Jigen expected the other shoe to be Lupin's womanizing, but the way Lupin womanized was...different from the assholes he'd dealt with in the mafia. He was still lusty and uncontrolled and god-awfully annoying but he wasn't not one of those men who got driven to violence by the idea of a woman turning him down. He didn't need to control women, to own them like possessions and dangle them off his arm. If anything, the more a woman played hard to get the more she interested Lupin, which was frustrating to watch when you were the man's bodyguard (Muscle? Associate?) but it made a welcome change from mob bosses who collected women like baseball cards.

It wasn't that the man was secretly batshit insane, either, because he wasn't. Lupin was weird but he wasn't...broken-weird, a distinction that only made sense in Jigen's already ridiculous world. Broken-weird dragged you down with it, made you part of its crazy, wrapped itself around your neck and strangled you while you were gasping its name. (Coccilina was broken-weird. Some days he wished he'd let her drag him to the bottom with her.)

Lupin's weird was the kind of weird that turned out to be genius once you were out the other side of his plan and not hanging halfway-down the Eiffel tower in a Harlequin costume trying to fight ninjas, a sentence that would have felt like Mad Libs until he started pulling heists with Lupin. Lupin's weird was thrilling but not the kind of thrill that brought you so close to death you weren't sure if you'd lived until the next day. It was a fun weird.

Jigen didn't even remember the last time he'd had fun on a job. Hell, the last time a job had left him laughing at the end of it, sitting on a roof with gem-studded bracelets up each arm and a tiara on his head like a pretty goddamn princess.

Lupin had looked right into his eyes and said 'What next, partner?' and it had made his stomach drop.

For Jigen, much of his life had felt like a long, boring train ride that made him keep looking at his watch and wondering how much longer he'd have to put up with it. He didn't have the kind of active urges that made a man eat his own bullets, but the kind that made you a little less interested in avoiding certain death than you otherwise might be. Lupin made him look forward to the next thing in a way no one else had in years, a realization he'd had while dodging yakuza machine gun blasts and the thought 'I can't die today, I have to go steal diamonds with Lupin next Wednesday' dropped into his head. 

Lupin was a good thing in his life and that made him paranoid, because nothing good came without strings. 

They were packing to leave their safehouse when, at long last, the second shoe dropped. It was only a brief moment, a flash before Lupin scooped it up and tucked it away into his bag again, and when Lupin flicked his head up to look at him Jigen pretended to be focused on polishing his shoes.

Long, thin plastic, a cap on a metal spine. A hypodermic needle.

Jigen tried to let it lie. Not his business, and even if it was he might be jumping to conclusions. It could be for safecracking. Could be for injecting sedatives into a target. Could be for plenty of nice, clean dishonest things. What stuck with him was how quickly Lupin made the needle vanish into his bag again and the sudden, nervous glance upward that Jigen only saw out of the corner of his eye, expression hard to make it out but movements clear. 

Nobody moved like that if they didn't have something to hide.

It wasn't until they were dressed in scrubs and trying to casually saunter their way out of a hospital before their 'patient' noticed their priceless custom idiot rich person wristwatch was missing that Jigen really started to worry. Lupin had them detour to the nurse's station for a 'grocery run', making him stand outside as a guard while he pillages the pharmacy.

Sure, Jigen told himself. Antibiotics and painkillers were expensive, and why pay for what they could steal? That was the whole point of being a thief. He nodded to a pair of passing nurses and tried to look like he was bored instead of terrified.

Lupin's health was not his business. Not his problem. His mental health, maybe, in that Lupin was the one making the plan and calling the shots, but Lupin's jobs were always temporary. He could just walk away. 

(He always said he would, every time Lupin's lack of impulse control made a job go south. Somehow Lupin always pulled him back.)

Back at the hotel, Lupin cracked a joke about getting a 'tip' from their patient as he pulled a plastic bag out of the false cleavage he'd been using to simultaneously tease their mark and hide their loot. He cursed as he tugged away the prosthetic chest, which left his chest slightly less hairy as the adhesive separated from his body. Jigen, half-heartedly, fired back about the tip their patient had wanted to slip to what he thought was a beautiful single woman who was so very interested in his life (and his left wrist).

In the midst of their mingled laughter the bag fell from Lupin's hands, letting a row of plastic-capped needles spill out. Lupin quickly fell to a crouch to grab them, and Jigen found the words spilling from his mouth just as easily.

"You know you don't need that stuff, right?"

"Eh?"

"That...that stuff you're shooting yourself up with. You don't need it."

Shit. Since when was he a busybody, and who the hell was he to be giving life advice, when he barely cares about living most days? 

Lupin was even laughing at him, but the protective hand he had around the bag showed he cared more than he let on.

"What's it to you? I didn't realize you were some kind of health nut. Come on, that stuff's expensive. What's got you so fussy?"

"I'm not. I just--" He couldn't answer for it. He couldn't justify why he gave a shit what Lupin did to himself, how badly he fucked himself up on whatever garbage he's been putting into his body to make life a little less boring. He couldn't justify it with anything but 'I don't want to lose what you've given to me'. It was that shameful realization that sent his hand shooting out to grab the bag away and hold it out the open window.

Lupin would probably shoot him for it. The mafiosos and warlords would. They'd play nice with you, buy you scotch and hookers and butter you right up until you started having your own opinions, and then it was all downhill from there.

Except for Lupin. Lupin, who let Jigen insult his overactive libido and ridiculous fashion choices, whose reaction to a woman ignoring him to flirt with Jigen was resigned laughter and pulling faces behind her back, not red-faced insistance htat Jigen know his place. Lupin, who had one hell of an ego but didn't seem to mind having it punctured.

Instead of pulling his gun, Lupin held up his hands. "Let's calm down, okay? Maybe don't try to concuss pedestrians with medical supplies."

"I don't like you using that stuff," Jigen reiterated. He tried not to think about how silly he felt, holding a plastic bag out the window like it was a priceless hostage.

"Don't knock it until you try it."

"I did try it." He wants Lupin to shoot him for this, it would make things less socially awkward. "I used to use, back in LA. Everyone did. It took the edge off, I didn't give a shit."

"Hey, Jigen, I'm not sure we're talking about the same stuff--"

"It made things easier. You don't even notice after a while. Then I realized my hands were shaking every time I was off the stuff."

Lupin's eyebrows went right up. "A gunman with shaky hands. I can see that would be a problem." His foot slid ever so slightly forward.

"If I kept doing it, it'd have killed me, and by that point I'd have welcomed it. I stopped right on the spot."

"Just like that. Cold turkey." The other foot slid forward as Lupin's face held his gaze, warm and comforting.

"Yeah. Was a shit month or two, but. If I can't shoot straight, I might as well be dead. It's all I'm good for."

"I wouldn't say that. You have great legs, for one."

And suddenly Lupin's leg snapped out, sweeping JIgen's feet out from under him in a move so fast he barely noticed it. Lupin's hand snapped around the plastic bag, and a single hypodermic needle went flying out the window like a stray moth while the rest was snatched back inside. Jigen found himself laying underneath Lupin with his arms pinned by Lupin's bony legs and the man leaning over him with a predatory smile.

"Jigen-chan, I'm flattered. Really. But this isn't what you think."

"Fuck you," Jigen mumbled, exhausted. 

"Eh, I'll think about it." Lupin upended the bag, spilling bottles and packages on top of Jigen's resigned face. He brushed them away and held up a small vial in front of his nose.

"Read that."

Jigen squinted at the vial until he could sound out the tiny text. "Testosterone Cypionate--the fuck is that?"

"Synthetic hormones. That's what got you so hot and bothered about me being a junkie." Lupin selected a needle from the floor as if selecting a fountain pen to sign his name with, and begin casually unwrapping it.

"Get the fuck off me." Jigen tried to struggle, only to find those extremely flexible legs were pinning his arms to his sides.

The cap popped off with a click. "Don't wiggle, or you'll get poked instead," Lupin instructed, as if anything about this was vaguely related to fucking normal. "And you of all people can't afford to get any more hairy."

Jigen laid his head back on the floor and sighed. "You're such a weird asshole, Lupin. So that's what, for building up muscles? Like stereoids? Because if so, hate to tell you, it's not working."

"Not that kind of hormones. It's a medical treatment - replacing what my natural self isn't making enough of."

"You worried about hair loss or something?"

"Or something."

Lupin drew out a dose with one needle, then selected another head from the pile on the floor and swapped it out. "Used to have to do this right in the muscle, hurt like hell, but they got these smaller needles for subcutan--I can feel you getting tense down there, settle down. This isn't heroin or whatever the hell you thought I was on. I've been doing this since I was robbing corner stores."

Jigen lay limp under the man's weight, once again resigning himself to another round of Enduring Lupin's Bullshit. "The way you act, why wouldn't I assume you were on drugs? No impulse control, giggling all the time, trying to fuck every woman with a pulse."

"Not everyone treats Humphrey Bogart like a role model, Jigen. Try having an emotion sometime, it'll be a cute look on you." Lupin stripped off his shirt, exposing a lean torso with a slight paunch dusted with dark hair. He prodded at one hairy patch of skin, squeezed it briefly, and then slipped the needle in without flinching. The injection was slow, and Lupin didn't break eye contact with Jigen for a moment of it. It was only once the syringe was emptied and the needle slid back out that Lupin finally threw his leg over Jigen and let the man clamber out from under him. 

"I don't get it."

"You wouldn't. But I get it. This brain's all natural." Lupin tapped the side of his head. "Body's a bit of a custom job, but so's the car. I figure if I gotta live in this meatsuit I got authority over what it looks like."

Jigen half-sat, propped up on one arm, and let his eyes roam over Lupin's shirtless body as the man merrily put away his supplies. His age was impossible to determine but he had a pretty large collection of scars for someone who could pass as a college student - most of them from burns or bullets, but he could just barely pick out two small slits across the chest that looked surgical. 

The man wasn't pretty, and his body's appearance was the one thing he wasn't vain about. But a custom job...yeah, he could see Lupin being the kind of guy who'd treat his body as changeable as parts on the Fiat.

When Lupin caught him staring he didn't look away or feign disinterest this time, and found that rather than disgust Lupin sat back on the bed, one arm behind him like a pinup model.

"Also that's a lie, I don't try to fuck every woman with a pulse."

"Hm? You got proof of that?"

"Nah, it's a category error." His coy smile grew into a smug grin. " You're assuming I'd only fuck women." He crooked a slow finger at Jigen. "Want to see what else I've got customized?"

"You're a real weird guy, Lupin."

"Yeah," said Lupin, watching as Jigen took a few slow, hesitant steps toward the bed. The look of triumph on his face lit up the room with its glow. "But I'm starting to pick up that you like weird."


End file.
